Gaming

First off, Happy New Year. We're so far into the 2020s and I really can't believe it. New year means new games.

My final major contribution and game I played was Old School Rally, and I was really excited for it, but it ultimately was just so disappointing. Despite that, I'm likely going to keep playing it anyway because the achievements are quite easy to get (even if one of them is grindy).

As I mentioned last month, I'm now a Stardew Valley player, courtesy of one of my best friends gifting it to me for Christmas. I've been playing it with her and her husband, and it's a great way for the three of us to just chill out and enjoy time with each other.

We've already at December of this year. Holy shit.

What are you playing?

Because of family circumstances, we decided to open presents on Thanksgiving instead of Christmas to accommodate everyone's travel plans. With that, I got a lot of PS5 games. I'm currently playing Ghost of Yotei.

Other games I got in my presents were The Outer Worlds 2, Death Stranding 2, Horzion Forbidden West, and F1 25. It might be a while before I truly get to them though, haha.

I'm currently on my way to achievement grind my way through all of the WRC games. Or at least, the ones I can get.

There are some that I can't get anymore because online achievements are a sin and should not exist.

I have found my PS5 and hopefully I will get that set up at this house and start playing it again.

Can't believe it's already October. What the heck is happening?

I'm making my way through Haste. Really fun game, but it will kick your ass twice over if you don't mess with the difficulty options.

From the Autumn Sale, I also now own all of the WRC games except for EA Sports WRC. Gonna make my way through achievement hunting those. Speaking of achievement hunting, here's a thread if you want to celebrate some hunts or request help through them.

Welcome to the Achievement Hunters Thread. Achievements/Trophies are a really cool (in my opinion anyway) part of gaming culture from the seventh-generation onwards. In this thread, you can share some achievements for games that you're really proud of. Maybe you finally got every single one for a game that you've played for a really long time.

Additionally, this can also be used as a place to ask for achievement help. Online achievements suck when no one plays the game online anyway. If you find someone here that happens to own the same game you're hunting the online achievements for, the two of you can arrange a time to go co-op achievement hunting!

Whether you're hunting on PC, Xbox, PlayStation. Hell, if you're a RetroAchievements user, you've come to the right place. We celebrate and collaborate on unlocking these digital trophies.

Brand new month. Brand new thread.

I'm in the middle of playing some of my Steam backlog whilst inevitably buying more games later down the road and making that backlog even bigger. I do intend to update my Steam wishlist, and the number of perfect Steam games I have has gone up to 14. My most recent addition to that collection is Sleeping Dogs.

Hello everyone. What are you playing this month?

I finally got around to playing Celeste after it's been sitting on my Steam library for over a year.

As you can probably tell, I have felt some pain. But it's pain that came with a lot of fun and a good story. I ended up collecting 100 strawberries before reaching the top of the mountain, with just a little over 1000 deaths on my first playthrough.

Beyond that, I've also picked up a few games for super cheap on the Steam Racing Fest. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a racing game junkie to my core.

I'd love to hear what you guys are up to.

The Steam summer sale started just a week ago and is still ongoing. What have you picked up in that time?

I'm giving a special mention to Dungeons of Hinterberg. Really fun game that takes a genre combo that seems unlikely to work, but it somehow manages to... make it work. In fact, I wrote a review on it.

It's a new month which means I'm asking you guys what's going with you guys.

First off. Happy Pride Month! I'm flying the Asexual flag colors on my avatar as I do every year. However you spend the month, I hope you have fun.

I've been writing a lot of guides for RollerCoaster Tycoon guides as part of a giant project I call "Project Sawyer". Which is a list of hundreds of guides I plan to write, and the number has slowly gone up over time. Previously it was 386, then 397, and now it's standing at 407. Here's a link to my spreadsheet if you want to see exactly what beast I'm tackling here. This is a very ambitious project that will likely take me literal years to complete, but I believe I can do it.

Naturally this means that I've also been playing these games quite a lot too. I've been trying to learn Simutrans, which is inspired by OpenTTD. VERY difficult to learn. Other transporting games I could learn fairly quickly, but not this one.

So... what about you guys?

What have you been playing?

You may have noticed that I put four reviews up over the week. Naturally I've been playing a lot of those games for quite a while now (especially Locomotion. I've played a LOT of Locomotion).

Last month, one of my best friends and her husband also bought Minecraft for me out of the blue to give the three of us an extra thing to bond over. And as is typical in my limited Minecraft adventures: My first instinct is to build a house on top of a tree.

So, first off, it is April Fools Day when I post this, but it is a genuine discussion post. Happy April Fools day or whatever days on the month you might be celebrating.

Late March has been a fun time for me. Most people here know that I'm a longtime fan of RollerCoaster Tycoon, but the past week and a half has seen me giving a run of Chris Sawyer's other games, OpenTTD and Chris Sawyer's Locomotion.

Suffice to say that I don't really have that much idea of what I'm doing, but it's fun to try these games. I was 8 years old when I first tried to play RCT and didn't know what to do, and here I am 17 years later in the same exact spot with the man's other games.

Speaking of RCT, I'm also trying RCT3 for the first time in my life:

Long post with lots of images. But how are you guys gaming this month?

Hey, folks! Decided to start a new thing where we, as a community, give away codes we don't want. I'm sure a lot of us have codes from Humble Bundles or e-mails that we don't want to play or have since gotten somewhere else (like on Epic or through Prime Gaming). This thread is for giving away such codes so others can enjoy them. Now, before we begin:

DON'T POST THE CODES DIRECTLY

There's bots lurking around that will steal them. It happens a lot on Reddit. I don't know if our site is affected, but better safe than sorry. Post a code, replace some letters with question marks, then post what the letters are.

Here's two codes:

• ???81D68AD2F91FAFB
  • Missing letters: RDR
  • What it is: Massive GOG discount for the Metro series, it's 2033 Redux, Last Light Redux, Exodus, and all the DLC for 88% off (about 7 euros)
  • This one only lasts for a little over 20 hours, so get it while it's hot!
• ?9M4Y-F3KND-BA?P3
  • Missing letters: X in both spots
  • What it is: Steam key for Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Let us know if you redeem the codes, so people don't just try to get them.

A little bit late to the punch because we've been busy, but here is the thread for this month. Let me know what you guys are doing.

I myself am not doing anything specific. I'm in the process of moving, and haven't really focused on one game in particular.

What are you up to this month? Have any games in mind for the future? Let us know in the comments below!

I'm a little early, but January can't go away soon enough lol. Not gonna go into more detail than I already have: suffice to say, it sucked.

At any rate, in terms of games I'm currently looking to play, I've got two plates spinning: I bought Eternal Strands on a whim, and I'm currently downloading Marvel's Spider-Man 2 because as we've already established, I'm impulsive.

Eternal Strands is like Shadow of the Colossus meets Immortals: Fenyx Rising, but with some cool additions. You utilize Frost, Fire, and/or Gravity powers to overcome challenges, and the game is quite rewarding of creativity: you can make a dragon fall from the sky by freezing its wings, or create a gravity-pocket and set it off as you jump on it to launch yourself into the air. My favorite thing so far has been the crafting system, of all things: I usually don't care much to craft stuff, but Eternal Strands is nice enough to let you Reforge your items with better materials really easily, and nothing is lost. All of your used materials go right back to your inventory if you swap them out; it's really convenient. This is balanced by inventory-management while you're out in the field, but I'm okay with that - the challenge of the game would be snapped in half if you could just hoover up everything you wanted.

As for future stuff, most of the games I'm looking forward to come out in the late-March/April window. February is pretty lean - for me at least - although I do have my eye on Avowed. Never played a Monster Hunter game before, so while I am semi-intrigued by MH Wilds, I'll probably pass on it.

What are you up to this month? Have any games in mind for the future? Let us know in the comments below!

It's a new year, if you didn't notice, which means it's time to get excited about all the games that might/will come out in 2025. My list includes Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Borderlands 4, Lunar Remastered Collection, DOOM: The Dark Ages, and more. It's gonna be a packed year, for sure! Of course, we don't yet know when they will come out, so in the more immediate future I have the Marvel's Spider-Man 2 port to Steam as my next-closest game to be interested in.

Currently, I am going back-and-forth between Path of Exile 2 and my modded run of Baldur's Gate III. I bought a Horipad Steam Controller from Amazon - although I'm still waiting for it to arrive - and with that fancy new device I'll have everything I need to play (& review!) games...except maybe a better computer lol. I've got my Switch, my PlayStation 5 as backup, a PC that can run Steam, a Steam Deck, and now the controller.

The Horipad is supposed to have programmable buttons, so it damn well better be able to take screenshots with the push of a button! I'll be really annoyed otherwise: pressing F12 on a Keyboard + Mouse setup is really hard mid-gameplay, and pulling screenshots off the Steam Deck can be annoying. I hope the controller is the perfect middle-ground option.

I'm hoping to review even more games this year; new ones, of course, but also some older titles via our "Timely Reviews" line. It irked me a little that my "favorite games of 2024" article was literally just the ones I reviewed lol - I need more! I am also hoping to do a light bit of game-streaming: not such that you can see my face or hear my voice, per se, but just dipping my toes in the water while I play games with my sister in the passenger seat (like when we were kids).

Hey, folks! The Game Awards are about to start, and we have a bingo board for you to have some fun during the presentation.

What are you up to this month? Have any games in mind for the future? Let us know in the comments below!

I bought nothing from the Steam Autumn Sale, which is a good thing. That said, I've been a bad girl and continue to buy stuff I shouldn't with funds I barely have, like board games and stuff D: Next up on the docket is Marvel Rivals, which I assume will cost money: they did a survey and the players overwhelmingly voted for all present and future characters to remain free and open access, so naturally they've got to get the $$$ somewhere lol.

Beyond that, I'm gonna try and make a better effort to clear out my backlog and conserve my funds; first up is Baldur's Gate III, Round 3. Mods should hopefully help spice up the experience and keep me engaged long enough to actually finish it this time!

What are you up to this month? Have any games in mind for the future? Let us know in the comments below!

At present, I am done playing Marvel Snap again (again). I've transitioned over to Pokemon TCG Pocket - while this game has packs that muddy your ability to chase things, it still feels less predatory than Snap does if you want to make specific decks. The ability to craft a particular card always helps. Snap remained fun, but it's just too expensive.

Beyond that, I'm probably gonna start Dragon Age: The Veilguard sometime today. Haven't decided on a class yet - Warrior has a fun looking dropkick attack and can become a Reaper, a necromantic combatant different than the normal Paladin/Barbarian/Fighter experience one usually gets offered in RPGs. Mage is always a fun one, too, and Rogue might be as well; too many appealing choices! I haven't forgotten about Black Myth: Wukong, but maybe if I step away and focus on something else, I can return to the monkey with a healthier/happier mindset.

Regarding November at large, I'm not sure if anything major comes out this month that I want. December is Marvel Rivals, Indiana Jones, The Spirit of the Samurai, etc.; but this month is weirdly dry for my interests. I'm okay with that, honestly: the amount of money I can devote to video games shrinks with each passing day it seems :/

What are you up to this month? Have any games in mind for the future? Let us know in the comments below!

My plans to complete Black Myth: Wukong in a timely fashion have backfired, with various other things vying for my time instead. Was gonna knuckle down and finish it this week, but between the latest Steam Fest and me having to be away from my computer for six days starting tomorrow, it just won't happen at this time. I've got Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom to consider, too, and Diablo IV's Vessel of Hatred expansion starting next Monday. Kinda annoyed, but I only have myself to blame: the opportunities were there if I wanted to take them.

In addition, I need to consider if I care enough about Dragon Age: The Veilguard to pick that up later this month. I played Origins ages ago, and I really enjoyed the game, but that's as far as I've gone in the series. It might be a major title in regards to reviewing, or it might flame out spectacularly; I'll play it by ear and figure it out another day.

What are you up to this month? Have any games in mind for the future? Let us know in the comments below!

...so I relapsed and went back to Marvel Snap. Unlike that other game that shall not be named, I still enjoy Snap a lot; it's my wallet that does not.

Beyond that, I've been playing Black Myth: Wukong, and some Last Epoch. I'm a little worn out on the latter, because there isn't enough to do: I've made most of the builds I wanted to try out, enjoyed them, and now I'm ready for something else. That just might be Diablo IV again, with the Vessel of Hatred expansion and "2.0 overhaul" patch, but that's not until October 8th.

Regarding other stuff on the docket, there is of course The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom at the end of the month, Wild Bastards before that, and an Early Access update to Lost Castle 2 that emphasizes new gear for improving the ability to throw stuff at enemies (which I already find hilarious). I'll probably wait on Wild Bastards for now, which wasn't my plan but Wukong is "in my way" time-wise, and Snap is leeching my funds made available for games.